


i would fall from grace just to touch your face

by its_tortle



Series: tumblr drabbles and ficlets [11]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Comfort, Fluff, Friendship/Love, Happy Ending, Light Angst, M/M, Not sexually tho, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Pre-World War II Bucky Barnes/Steve Rogers, SO, Through the Years, Touching, Tumblr Prompt, World War II, soft, steve is obsessed with bucky's chin dimple
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-25
Updated: 2021-01-25
Packaged: 2021-03-17 16:40:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28977540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/its_tortle/pseuds/its_tortle
Summary: steve reaching out for bucky's chin dimple through the years, as inspired by this anonymous ask:Steve loves to lay his head on Buckys lap and touch his chin dimple. (This habit almost got them court-martialed once but that's a different story)
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Series: tumblr drabbles and ficlets [11]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1951201
Comments: 8
Kudos: 119





	i would fall from grace just to touch your face

**Author's Note:**

> after making a little post about my love for sebastian stan's chin dimple yesterday, anon asked me this, and suddenly i had written 1.2k words.
> 
> tumblr post [here](https://its-tortle.tumblr.com/post/641231303259357184/steve-loves-to-lay-his-head-on-buckys-lap-and)

The first time Steve does it, he’s nineteen and drunk on Jameson. 

Bucky had managed to sneak a bottle from his father’s cabinet and brought it over to their apartment. Steve only needs three sips to get dizzy.

He tells Bucky as much, when the room starts spinning around him. Bucky laughs and pries the bottle from Steve’s hands, tells him to lay down.

And because he’s been wanting to do it for a whole while now, and there’s no active frontal lobe telling him not to now, he does. Right in Bucky’s lap.

Bucky makes a startled noise that dissolves into another laugh. Steve basks in it.

“You good?”, Bucky asks, looking down at the head in his lap.

Steve hums in affirmative, staring right back.

From this angle, Bucky should look almost comical. The remaining bit of the softness of his childhood face is bunched up around his chin, creating a fold where there is usually a sharp jawline. His cheeks are flushed and rosy from the whiskey, and his eyes are laughing in the dim warm light of the living room. 

He still looks straight out of the pictures.

Steve takes this all in, and then zeroes in on his favorite part.

He’s not sure why, in the sum of all his attraction to the beautiful man in front of him, Steve has zeroed in on the cleft in Bucky’s chin, but he has. It’s just always so tempting, so  _ there _ , and Steve wants nothing more than to place his thumb in it, to stroke the soft skin of the little dimple.

So he does.

It takes him about two seconds to realize how creepy and uncomfortable that is, and when he does, he freezes.

Bucky’s eyes widen minutely. He freezes too.

Steve watches his Adam’s apple bob in his throat.

Then, he recovers before Steve, slipping into an easy smile. His eyes twinkle. He says nothing.

Feeling his face heat up, Steve finally unfreezes and drops his hand.

“Sorry,” he mumbles. “Sorry. That was-”

But he cuts himself off because he’s not quite sure where that was going.

Bucky’s eyes turn that familiar medium between fond and worried.

“Let’s get you to bed, yeah?”

Steve nods, and rises from Bucky’s lap.

\---

The next time he touches that beautiful cleft in Bucky’s chin, he’s sober, because that’s all his new body allows.

They’re in his tent, only an hour after their return to base with the rest of the 107th. 24 hours ago, Steve thought Bucky was dead.

Now he’s right here, sitting down on Steve’s cot with dirty hair and an exhausted sigh, and Steve is so relieved he thinks he might cry.

He settles for dropping down onto the cot beside Bucky and dropping his head in his lap. Bucky lets out a huff of a laugh and begins carding his hand through Steve’s hair on autopilot. Nevermind that Steve’s hair is just about as disgusting as his at this point.

And because he hasn’t seen Bucky and his beautiful cleft chin in months, and because he feared he’d never see it again, Steve reaches out. 

His thumb, now considerably bigger than it was last time he dared to do this, somehow still fits right into the dent of Bucky’s skin.

It’s scruffy now, harder, unlike what it was when Bucky was barely twenty. 

It still feels like home.

And instead of acknowledging the impropriety of this action, Bucky just closes his eyes. His lips take on a small but familiar smile, and he leans into the touch, just a little.

Steve’s hand moves to cup his face, thumb still in the cleft, and Bucky lets him hold on, lets him stare.

“I missed you,” Bucky whispers eventually.

Steve doesn’t think he can say it back without crying, so he just presses into the dimple with a gentle deliberation for one, two, three moments, before he lets his hand fall away.

\---

He does it all the time after then, like that moment unlocked the urge entirely.

After nearly every fight, after every time he fears he might have lost Bucky -- which is a lot, too much, in this hellscape -- he reaches out for the dimple.

Bucky must realize Steve’s strange fixation, but if it bothers him, he doesn’t say so.

He lets Steve reach out as the dust of the war settles around them, lets him seek comfort on that little patch of skin. He finds comfort in the ritual too, in the knowledge that that’s Steve’s spot, and as long as he’s still still there to stake his claim on it, everything is okay.

And when they return to the tents, take their boots off their blistering feet and settle on the cot, he’ll let Steve do it again. 

Steve will lay his head on Bucky’s lap, just like he did at nineteen. He’ll reach up and gently place his thumb in the dimple. He’ll let it sit there for a few moments, gently pressing into the skin on Bucky’s jaw.

It’s a moment of calm in a never ending storm.

\---

Phillips walks into them doing this once, and almost has them court martialed. 

If Steve wasn’t Captain America, they both know they would have been.

But it would have been unjust, unnecessary, because it’s just a comforting moment between two brothers in arms.

That’s all. 

Right?

\---

When Bucky falls from the train, and Steve sits in the burst open car, shivering and in complete and utter disbelief, he has the strange thought that he hasn’t reached out for the dimple in more than a week.

It’s silly, but he can’t help but imagine that maybe if he had, Bucky wouldn’t have fallen at all.

\---

Nearly seventy years later, against all odds, Steve reaches out again.

He can’t know how much Bucky remembers, if he can recall this weirdly intimate ritual the two of them shared. But he can’t help but reach out, even if just for himself.

Bucky is smiling up at him, so different from the man he was in the war, even farther from the man he was in the shabby Brooklyn apartment, but somehow still the same.

His hair is longer, his shoulders wider. His cheeks are thinner and he has dark circles under his eyes, but his irises still shine the same shade of blue and his lips are still red and beautiful. And he still has the devastating dimple in his chin, the same one Steve placed his thumb in all those decades ago.

He’s sitting on an exam table in Wakanda, smiling up at Steve with a kind and beautiful smile that is both sad and joyful at the same time, and the dimple is right there.

Steve puts his thumb in it.

It still fits, which is somehow entirely unsurprising.

Bucky’s smile widens, and his eyes close. Steve’s breath catches, because Bucky remembers.

“I’m not sure why you’ve zeroed in on that spot,” Bucky says suddenly, quietly. “But it’s yours now.”

Steve presses in with just a tad more deliberation. Never hard, never forceful, but with purpose.

He swallows. “Keep it safe for me then.”

Bucky’s smile widens until there are beautiful little crinkles around his eyes. “Of course.”

Steve presses in one last time before his hand falls away.

Except that Bucky catches it in his own hand, stroking his finger over Steve’s knuckles. Slowly, he brings Steve’s hand back up to his face and places a warm kiss on the tip of Steve’s thumb.

“You keep that safe for me,” he says with a twinkle in his eye.

And Steve?

Steve is in love.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> kudos make me grin and comments make my whole damn week, so please don't be shy!
> 
> find me on [tumblr](https://its-tortle.tumblr.com) :)


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